The Surprising Strengths of Small Churches : Brandon O’Brien

Full-Text Transcript

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another insightful episode of FrontStage BackStage. I’m your host, Jason Daye. Each week, I have the honor and privilege of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader. We dive into a conversation, all in an effort to help you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you really thrive in both life and leadership. I’m excited because today I’ll be joined by Brandon O’Brien. Brandon serves as the Director of Global Thought Leadership for Redeemer City to City. He’s written a number of books, including a recently released revised and updated edition of his book, The Strategically Small Church. At this time, I’d like to welcome Brandon to the show. Brandon, welcome.

Brandon O’Brien
Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Jason Daye
Yeah, super excited about tackling this particular topic, the idea of the small church. Brandon, oftentimes, the big churches, the mega churches, get a lot of the publicity, naturally. But the reality is, the majority of churches across the US, and really around the world, even, are much smaller than that. So, Brandon, talk to us a little bit about just kind of the landscape when we think of a small church, specifically, as you wrote this book, The Strategically Small Church. How are you defining a small church? And how many small churches are there in respect to what we think of as larger churches, right?

Brandon O’Brien
Yeah, that’s a great question. Thank you. And sadly, I have a terrible mind for numbers, so I’m just pulling up the book now and making sure that I get my information right. But I think the easiest way to go is that the number of very large churches is much smaller than it seems. So, the most recent information I could see is that less than 1% of churches have more than 2000 in regular attendance. So mega church being defined as 2000 or more in regular attendance. It’s less than 1% of all churches that have that level of attendance. The vast majority of churches, I believe it’s 90% of churches, have under 100. So, the average is significantly lower, in the 65-70 range. Most pastors, not just in the United States, but all around the world and throughout history, will pastor a church of fewer than 100 people. For the purposes of this book, just because the numbers can be contested, we’ve picked kind of everything under 200 as “small”. In part because that 200 threshold in a lot of the church growth material is the place where, if you don’t break that barrier, they often say, then the only way to go is down. That that’s kind of a ceiling number. But I’m very aware, from my own experience and from talking to a lot of pastors, that there’s a very real existential difference between a church of 20 and a church of 199. So there’s a lot of diversity that’s summed up in that definition. But I would say, yeah, the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of churches will be under 100. Though I kind of wish that we could retire the language or the terminology of “small church”, because the reality is, the churches we typically call small are really just typical. They’re the typical church. But calling them small makes it sound like they’re smaller than usual, or that they’re smaller than preferred, or, I don’t know. When, in fact, they are the norm. And so this book, hopefully, is for the vast majority of ministry leaders in the United States to say, our church is not broken. It has what it needs to do what God has called us to do.

Jason Daye
Yeah. That’s excellent. Thank you for helping reframe that. And one of the things you mentioned in there was the Church Growth Movement. And I think it makes sense when we’re talking about the typical church, as you said, is on the smaller side, what we would think of as maybe on the smaller side. However, that’s actually normal. A lot of the reason we think that is because of the Church Growth Movement, right? So Brandon, you write about this in the book, and you kind of help set the stage. Help us process a little bit through kind of the history of the Church Growth Movement and its impact on how we as pastors and ministry leaders might think. So, help us understand how we right-size our thinking in relation to the Church Growth Movement.

Brandon O’Brien
Yeah, great question. So the histories are interesting, and I highly recommend Karl Vaters’ book Desizing the Church, where he goes into greater detail about the kind of various streams that become the Church Growth Movement. But I found it fascinating and kind of going back to this edition that already in the 60s, a lot of people were saying that the small church is kind of passe. And they didn’t call it the mega church, they called it the full-program church. The one that has the big choir, the youth group, the basketball team, and all the various things had become the standard. And already, at that point, people in small churches were feeling like they were kind of a relic of the past. I think one thing I would love for people to take away from the book and from this conversation is that I think often what is depicted as normal in size also has a pretty clear geographic focus, which is often suburbs of big cities, often in the American South and West. So, there’s kind of the Sun Belt area, which has a ton of very large churches. And then there are a lot of large churches outside some northern cities. But if you’re in a small town, the odds of you having a large church are almost zero. And so I think what is often compared is this ministry to that ministry. What’s not compared is this ministry context to this other ministry context. And what’s reasonable or preferable in those various places should be different. But what we tend to celebrate are those things that are very large, and they’re large, yes, because God is blessing the ministry, but also because they’re in a place where a population is growing, that has a good highway system that connects people from other places. A lot of those large churches are right near an exit, and so there are a lot of things that contribute to success that we don’t often talk about that are sociological or geographical. And I do hope that people reading the stories here will say, Right, the stories I’m hearing here are more similar to the realities that I live in my community, and so success for my ministry might look more like this than like a community that bears no real resemblance to my own.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s incredibly helpful, Brandon. And one of the things I love about the book is that you do highlight stories of churches and share how they are advancing the kingdom, how they’re engaging, and what does this look like in a space that, as you said, makes sense to the context. Because a lot of the buzz is around larger churches that, as you mentioned, are oftentimes in a different context, and so that can make a pastor who’s not in a similar context feel like somehow they’re failing. Somehow, they’re not measuring up to it. One of the interesting things, Brandon, in the book early on, is when you actually approach some of the biblical passages that are often used around the Church Growth Movement about the idea of things growing and the numbers being added each day. And I would love for you to walk through that a little bit with us to help us really appreciate what Scripture is saying and maybe what Scripture isn’t necessarily saying.

Brandon O’Brien
Right. Yeah, thank you. This is kind of my favorite part. The Biblical studies nerdy side of it, I really enjoy. But, yeah, I had somebody just recently, somebody that I kind of felt like should know better, mentioned to me that the very first church was a mega church. It says 2000 were added to their number. And I hadn’t heard that in a while. I think it kind of surprised me to hear it from this particular person. But comments like that over the years kind of sent me into those passages to say, I don’t think that’s what’s going on there, but what is going on there? And so I find it fascinating that if you kind of look through each of the places where there’s one of those summary statements that says a certain number of people were added to their number. Or it’s 2000, 3000, or a large number of Gentiles believed, or a large number of people became disciples. There are different ways it’s framed, but it comes up a lot in those first six or seven chapters of Acts. Almost every time that’s listed, what comes before it is the story of something that should have stopped the growth of the gospel. So, some of the disciples are thrown into jail and but then it says, But a large number was added, or Ananias and Sapphira deceive the Holy Spirit. And there’s this weird kind of judgment within the church that could divide the church from the inside. But then a large number is added to their fellowship. And so it seems like what Acts is telling us is not that the numbers themselves are significant, but anywhere there is opposition to and potential to stop the growth of the gospel, God intervenes and makes sure that the gospel continues to spread. And in fact, I think the numbers themselves, which are very impressive, 2000, 3000, or whatever, I think we’re meant to understand those as actually relatively small numbers. Because if you think of the very first church in Jerusalem, it’s 2000 people made up mostly of Jewish people who have come to celebrate Passover and stayed over to Pentecost there in Jerusalem. The best I can find, you could expect to have half a million or more people in Jerusalem for those events. And out of that huge number, only 2000 are responding to what God is doing in Jesus at that moment. And so I think where we hear it as mega language, I think the New Testament authors probably heard it as remnant language. That this is the small seed that God is kind of taking from all over the planet in order to kind of continue to carry on his work. And I think an evidence of that is that by the time we meet Paul, and he’s persecuting the church, it says that in Jerusalem, all the believers except for the 12 were sent out to various places by persecution. So, if the first church was a mega church, the mega church was over by the end of Acts 7, or something. And the narrator, Luke, never says, What a shame. He just says, All those people went back to their homes, telling the story about what was happening in Jerusalem and what God had done in Jesus, and about the Holy Spirit. And this is great news, because the message is going out. And so I think that does really reframe how we’re looking at those early passages. It’s not an accumulation of disciples in one place. That is the punch line. I think the punch line is that the number of disciples is growing, and they’re going out. And the Bible seems to be as happy about small groups of believers everywhere, maybe more happy, than they are about one large group of believers in one place. And that begins to kind of shift the vision of what’s happening there in the New Testament.

Jason Daye
Hey, friends, just a quick reminder that we provide a free toolkit that complements today’s conversation. You can find this for this episode and every episode at PastorServe.org/network. In the toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including our Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. This growth guide includes insights pulled from today’s conversation as well as reflection questions, so you and the ministry team at your local church can dig more deeply into this topic and see how it relates to your specific ministry context. Again, you can find it at PastorServe.org/network.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely. And I love that, because if we just think about it. Let’s just think about global Christianity, even today, right? We think about the movement in China. 1000s coming to Christ in China. And yet, it’s the underground church. They’re small house churches meeting in farmhouses, barns, or wherever. And we celebrate that. And we are so grateful and excited about the movement of the Spirit in those things, if we think about in the Middle East as well. So, we understand this, I think, and we celebrate this. But then, somehow, when we bring it back to maybe our context, whatever our context might be, we change the story a little bit. We shifted a little bit and got focused, or hyper-focused, maybe, on bigger and better, right?

Brandon O’Brien
Yeah, and I think that there are at least two things going on there. I think one is that, if when you look at those passages in Acts where a large number is added, almost in every case, not every case, but in almost every case, it is Jewish background people who hear the gospel and respond. When Paul is preaching and others are preaching among Gentiles, the numbers are much less impressive, right? So people believe, but we don’t get the 1000s believe in the same way. And the reason I think that’s important is that I do think that many of us enter ministry thinking that we’re sort of, this is an analogy, obviously, but like we’re Jewish, Jewish-background disciples preaching to Jewish background neighbors. That we’re people with the gospel, sharing it with even non-church people who know about God and know about the Bible, and really, we’re just kind of bringing them home. I don’t think we imagine ourselves in North America, in a sort of missionary position, where we’re going into a broader society that doesn’t have the frameworks for the gospel. So it’s not necessarily in every case that they’re resistant to it. It’s that this is new information to them, and they’re not really sure what to do with it. If that’s the case, then maybe one lesson of the New Testament is to say, if that’s the environment you’re in, and you’re in the space where the gospel is breaking new ground, you should expect it to go slowly. And I think we’re okay with that when it happens in Europe, or it happens in China, or happens in the Muslim-majority world, but we don’t think that North America should be hard ground, and so we expect something significantly different. And I do think, I don’t make a central point out of this, but I do think that kind of having a missionary mindset in your small church could be helpful. Instead of trying to be a chaplain to a largely Christian society, I’m a missionary in a largely un-Christian society. And I think that shift of mindset actually makes our work and our context much more similar to what’s happening in most of the New Testament. And that, to me, makes it feel like we’re not failing in this. We are, in fact, succeeding. But we’ve misunderstood the circumstances in which we’re doing our work. I think there are other things, too. Americans love big stuff. Walmart, Amazon, right? So, I think there’s some of that, but I do think fundamentally, we misunderstand the context, and we think we’re ministering in one environment, and really, we’re ministering in a different one. And I think that that is a pretty crucial realization to get to if we want to feel like we are having any sort of success in our ministry.

Jason Daye
Yep, that’s good. That’s helpful, Brandon. So, let’s talk a little bit about kind of a framework for us to be processing through. But you just specifically titled the book The Strategically Small Church. So, let’s talk a bit about some of the encouraging things, some of the strategic things that relate to a small church, which, again, is basically an average church. What are some of those encouraging things that we can lean into?

Brandon O’Brien
Yeah, so the title or the adjectives, strategically small. I think I’ve been in churches that are very small, and they’re small, I would say, because the people there are sort of ornery, and they would like for it to stay small. And I’ve been in other churches where the congregation is great, but they’re in a shrinking community. People are moving out. The economy is terrible, you know, etc. And so that’s kind of inevitably small. I mean, there’s a sense in which it can’t be helped. I think strategically small I imagine to be a church that has recognized that it has what it needs to do the mission that God has called them to do, that its size is not a liability, but does create some unique opportunities. And so instead of trying to fix its size, it’s just trying to put its congregation to work in worship, mission, and formation in the community. And some of those advantages that people might discover is that there’s a lot of research, for example, on the value of intergenerational connections within a church for someone’s long-term faith formation that the Fuller Youth Institute and others have talked about that, I think, the determining factor in a person’s young person’s life that dictates whether they stay in the faith after they graduate high school or don’t, is being in relationship with other Christians in addition to their parents. And in a lot of large ministries, when a family shows up at the building, the children go one place, the youth go another place, and the adults go somewhere else. And there’s a place for age-specific ministry, of course, but it’s often the case that it’s hard, actually, for younger people to interact with older people in a large church. In a small church, you often have the generations all together because you can’t help it, and now just because you’re all in the room doesn’t mean you’re having effective intergenerational ministry, but you don’t have to work against the structure. You don’t have to work against the facility. You have everybody there. And so if you can just recognize that as a value rather than a liability, then you’ve got more at your disposal than you realize. You have this good thing that you can leverage. And so I think that’s one thing, right, the intergenerational thing. I think even the ability, with COVID, I know a lot of churches got smaller, but it was a lot of large churches that got smaller because they’re so reliant on large gatherings. But in churches in which a smaller gathering was already pretty normal, or a lot of interconnected small groups, the lower overhead of facilities and budgets gave them a lot of agility to make changes that a larger organization doesn’t have. I sometimes think of a coach I had in high school who drove the school bus too fast on our way to games, and he would say that you can’t stop the cheese wagon on a dime, is what he would say when he blew through a red light or something. And I think of that often with large churches. That you can’t stop the ministry of a large church on a dime. You can’t pivot quickly, necessarily, when you’ve got a lot of staff and a lot of overhead, but in a small congregation, you can make a choice in a couple of weeks to do something differently in order to respond to the needs of the congregation or the community. So, there’s more to say. But I think even things like having generations together, being agile and able to respond to needs without having a lot of bureaucracy to go through and other things are a couple of really helpful kind of advantages that people may not realize they have in their church, and so if they could see them that way, then they’re off to a really good start.

Jason Daye
Yeah, Brandon, I really love the way you position us there, and in the book, even, about how, oftentimes, things that we may assume our liability can actually be a great asset. I mean, you gave two really good examples right there. A lot of small churches might say, Oh, we don’t have the staff to have all this programming for different age levels. Well, that, as you said, could be an asset. Think consciously about how the intergenerational connectivity can be a blessing to those who are engaged. And so just kind of that switch in thinking, I think, is so helpful. Brandon, what about mission? Because I think this is one of the places where a lot of pastors get stuck. This idea of the Great Commission, which is awesome, which is huge, right? Which, hey, we go into ministry because we want to see people come to faith in Christ. That’s why we’re pastors. That’s why we preach. That’s why we do what we do. And so sometimes that struggle is, you’re in a smaller church and you’re struggling with seeing that, and then you see some big, mega church that, oh, they must be reaching a bunch of people with the gospel. So how do we have we wrap our minds around this idea of mission, the great commission, and those types of things?

Brandon O’Brien
Yeah, great questions. I think two things come to mind, and one is the question of scale. So I think sometimes it’s hard for us to believe that we’re making a significant difference if we’re not making a numerically significant difference. If we can’t say there were X number of baptisms or X number of salvations, and we see that number going up, it feels like we’re doing less significant work. I sometimes think of, we talked about Acts, if you move into the letters of the New Testament, I always find it interesting that Paul, in his letters, refers to congregants in churches and always refers to them by first name, which communicates to me that the congregation he’s writing to is small enough that he doesn’t have to clarify which Eunice he’s talking about, you know, there’s just the one. And the early churches, the congregations Paul writes to, he has a lot of criticism for them about things that are going badly, and never once is size a problem. So it’s maybe morality. It’s maybe the way you guys are treating each other. It’s maybe a lack of generosity. But, he never says, Why don’t you guys have more baptisms? Why aren’t you seeing more visitors on a Sunday morning? Instead, he says, Live a quiet life. Give honor to people where it’s due. Do things that make the gospel attractive. And he doesn’t seem to be worried about things happening at mass scale in the way that we are. So I think the one is scale. I think the other is, this will sound like a criticism, and I don’t mean it that way, but I think it’s the case that most large churches are more similar to one another than small churches are to one another, in the sense that if you’ve got a large ministry in a suburban area, the music will be familiar if you go from one to another. The sort of tone or style of it will be familiar. Some of the messaging will be familiar, and it will be attractive to and effective with the slice of the population that is comfortable with, feels attracted to, or feels welcome with those things. That style of music, style of preaching, or style of dress, etc. But in every community, there are pockets of the population for whom no one is designing a ministry, so no one’s trying to attract the people in this industry or the people in this neighborhood or something because they’re all kind of modeling their ministries after each other, and they’re all targeting a kind of similar demographic. So I think another way to think about mission is, instead of saying, How do we get more people here? We ask, Who are we uniquely equipped to reach that nobody else is reaching. And if you’re able to reach, if it’s a couple of dozen people that are ignored by the larger body of Christ in the area, then that’s a successful mission, right? That’s leaving the 99 to find the one. It’s going into the smaller, more focused kind of spaces, to find people who may not feel comfortable in other places. And so I think if we were to redirect from thinking exclusively in scale and then from thinking exclusively in a certain style or demographic, and just to say, Who’s near me that is not being served, who’s not hearing the gospel, and is not being served by the church, and those folks become my mission. That can give you a much clearer focus, but also you can measure whether it’s working or not when you have clarity on a particular group of people.

Jason Daye
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Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s good. Brandon, on that point, that final point there, what would you recommend if a small church pastor, listening or watching now, is thinking, Okay, how are we uniquely wired to reach a unique demographic or unique group of people? How would you recommend they process through that, maybe with their key volunteers, or their church board, or whatever, try to think, well, what does that look like for us?

Brandon O’Brien
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I’m not 100% sure I answer that question as directly as you’ve asked it in the book, but I think there are some insights scattered through there that can help. One is, I think, to just look at who you have. And so if you look across the congregation, very often, it’s a good practice to say who’s missing, in the sense that, if we don’t have any young people, or we don’t have any older people, or we’re missing young families or something, it’s good to ask the question. We often focus so much on who’s not there that we’re not paying attention to, like, who’s actually in the room, and are there any patterns? Is it that most of the people here work in similar industries? For example, do they all work in a local factory, or are they all in foodservice? Are they all in banking? What’s common to the folks here? Are the kids in school in the same places, or do they distribute out in a whole bunch of different districts? Or if it’s not work and it’s not kids, maybe it’s interests. Does the congregation share an interest in some hobby, something like that, or a shared cause in the community? And I think if I were to think about starting there and saying, what is it that we have at our disposal, and we have people with access to what in the community, and then maybe even ask the question, how typical is that? Are we aware of other people who have this concentration of these kinds of people in one place? And if we were to ask them, do your friends feel the people that you work with, recreate with, or your kids go to school with, do they feel comfortable going to churches in the area? And if not, why? You kind of just begin to work out from, I think, who’s there, and figure out what it is that makes them feel welcome, what you could do to make others like them feel welcome, and kind of broaden that way. I think that starting with what you have, and trying to figure out how you leverage what you have, before you start thinking about what’s missing, I think is a really good starting point. And I think that it’s often encouraging. People start looking and they realize they had more than they thought. But I think it’s also good for the congregation because it’s great when your leadership is talking about you as an asset and not as a liability, right? And so I think it could shift the leadership point of view. I think it could shift the congregation’s point of view, that instead of being embarrassed by what we have, or instead of being embarrassed by what we lack, we can be excited about what we have and who we are. And I think people find communities that know who they are, are not ashamed of who they are, and who are sincerely hospitable within that realm. I think people find that attractive and that you could actually make a lot of ground without spending a lot of money. Just asking questions, looking carefully, and trying to see value where you didn’t see it before.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s really good, Brandon. Really good. One of the things that you touched on in the book is this idea of excellence. And that’s another kind of keyword from Church Growth Movement, this idea of excellence. We do everything with excellence, and that can be a challenging word sometimes to the smaller church, the typical church, because what looks like excellence as you’re scrolling on Instagram and seeing other churches or whatever, is something that, honestly, we could not achieve on whatever, the resources we have, the people we have, the facility, or whatever it is. So, talk to us a little bit about this idea of excellence and how maybe we need to reframe that or reconsider that.

Brandon O’Brien
Yeah, that’s a good one. That’s a big one. Yeah, I am familiar with a church that I think highly of, but they have a phrase that they repeat often, that excellence honors God and inspires people, and I think that’s true, but there are a lot of unspokens in a phrase like that about what we mean when we say excellence? And I think, yeah, I think that there are a couple of ways to tackle this. One is to say that I think when we talk about excellence, it would be helpful for a smaller church to think about what it is they could do excellently, and it might not be everything. Meaning it may not be professional quality music on a Sunday morning or something like that, but they could be really, really good at being engaged in the community in a way that is positive, winsome, and testifies to the love of Jesus. We’ve been to a church before. I’ve always joked that I don’t know how you market this, but we were in a church before that was really good when you were going through a bad time. They were comforting. There were no platitudes. They knew how to take care of people. And you can’t market that because it’s hard to say, Come suffer with us or something. Nobody wants to do that. But when you’re in the middle of it and they’re good at it, that’s the kind of excellence I appreciated in those moments more than any well-done worship song or something, right? So I think one level is trying to figure out, what do we mean? What is it that we are excellent at? And I think every church would have something. Their hospitality, generosity, mission, engagement in the community, or something like that. And so kind of thinking in smaller pieces and trying to think, instead of just saying that excellence is often attributed to the building, the preaching, the music, and that’s about it, right? And so just set those aside for a second and say those don’t matter. What else is there, and what else are we doing excellently? Those things do matter, but I think just kind of setting them off the table could be really helpful. I think another thing is that excellence does matter, but I do think that there is, maybe I’m speaking for my own generation, and not the one beneath me, but I think to us, excellence is understood in a certain kind of way. Meaning with highly professional, highly produced, kind of slick, seamless activity, I think for a number of people, not everyone, that feels inauthentic, and it can feel like a cover where you think, What’s going on behind the curtain? Right? Like, there’s a lot of glamor, there’s a lot of something, but there have been so many stories in recent times about people involved in a ministry that was excellent, but their personal lives were not excellent, and their ministry behind the scenes was not excellent. And so I think that authenticity and sincerity are more appealing than people often think, and that often, where a lack of excellence in something becomes a problem is when we’re apologetic about it. When people walk in the door, and you’re like, Oh, I’m so sorry that the building is this, or that the music is that. I think if you just say, This is who we are, and what you see is what you get, that there’s something deeply attractive about that. Again, not for everyone, but maybe for the people who in your community are not currently attracted to a very large, excellent service down the road, right? So I think that thinking about excellence in terms of more than just Sunday morning or the building, and also thinking about the value of authenticity and sincerity, as I think equally appealing as excellence, I think, are maybe good places to start.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that, Brandon. And that whole idea of excellence relationally, the idea that authenticity, as you spoke of, that there’s that connectivity that in a smaller church people can experience maybe more readily than in the crowd of a larger church. So leaning into, as you said, that authenticity, that relational equity that you can have is super key and super important. Absolutely love this conversation. It’s been fantastic, Brandon. And in your book, The Strategically Small Church. And again, just the stories you tell of different churches and how they leaned into being small, what did that mean? What did that bless them with? What did that give them to really impact their people and impact their community? Absolutely incredible. As we’re kind of winding down this conversation, Brandon, I want to give you an opportunity just to share some words of encouragement to pastors, ministry leaders, men, and women who are on the front lines of ministry. What words of encouragement would you like to leave with them?

Brandon O’Brien
I was just talking with somebody this weekend about how I have served in vocational ministry in the past. I now work in supporting church-planters. And I was talking to this person, and we agreed that, really, from 2020 to the present has to be the hardest time in my lifetime to be a pastor of a church. There’s just no end to social challenges, of everything from, whether it’s restrictions on meeting in COVID, and then different reactions to restrictions on meeting during COVID, to social justice issues, to politics. The landmines feel like they have multiplied everywhere for people in ministry, and I think it feels impossible to really take a step without stepping on a landmine. And I think that, as I’ve understood it from the research and just from conversation, smaller churches have always been the majority of churches in the US, but they’re a larger majority now than they were before the pandemic. So churches are getting smaller. Large churches are getting larger, but all the other churches are getting smaller. And I think you can feel alone in that, like everyone else is doing it right, but I’m doing it wrong. And I think one thing I’d want to encourage people in is that your small congregate, the smallness of your congregation, is not a measure of your faithfulness or of your success. Size is not a biblical indicator of ministry success. It’s not an unbiblical one, but it’s just hard to find in the New Testament a place that says, If your church hits a certain number, then God says, Well done, good and faithful servant, right? Like it’s not based on attendance. Then I think that to kind of just know that the vast majority of pastors are in the place that you’re in. And hopefully, if you can find them, connect with them, and talk honestly about it, I think you’ll find a lot of comfort. I think to the first point, to me, I increasingly think it’s always been the case that all ministry is local, like you pastor the people you have, right? I think that the visibility of large ministries that broadcast and share on social media and do all these other things gives you the feeling that a ministry should always be everywhere. But, I think when social things are difficult and when there’s a lot of landmines to step on, thinking of church in the most local way possible, who is in the room at any given time, and how do I care for them? Who are my neighbors, and how do I care for them? Is probably a really great way to kind of start thinking about how to judge the effectiveness of your ministry. If you’re preaching for YouTube, or you’re preaching for Twitter, or you’re preaching for Instagram, you’ll miss the people that are in your care. And so I think thinking as locally as you can may feel restrictive, but I think it’s actually an encouragement. It’s a blessing to say that what you have is what you need, and you just have to figure out how to do what you want with what God has put in your hand.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. That’s a great word, Brandon. Thank you for joining us on FrontStage Backstage and making the time to hang out. Love this conversation. And for those of you who are watching or listening, each week, we create a toolkit that accompanies every conversation, just like the one that Brandon and I just had. And you can find that toolkit at PastorServe.org/network. In there, you’ll find a ton of resources, including links to Brandon’s book, The Strategically Small Church, some additional resources, and a Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. In the growth guide, you’ll find insights pulled from our conversation, also questions for you to wrestle with and to take the leaders in your local church through, just to see how this conversation meets you in your local context. So, we encourage you to check that out at PastorServe.org/network. Brandon, again, thank you for making the time. Thank you for The Strategically Small Church. Thank you for speaking on behalf of the typical church and for the encouragement that you provide. Certainly appreciate that, my friend.

Brandon O’Brien
Thank you. Yeah, my pleasure, and thanks for having me.

Jason Daye
Absolutely. God bless you.

Jason Daye
Here at PasterServe, we hope you’re truly finding value through these episodes of FrontStage Backstage. If so, please consider leaving a review for us on your favorite podcast platform. These reviews help other ministry leaders and pastors just like you find the show, so they can benefit as well. Also, consider sharing this episode with a colleague or other ministry friend, and don’t forget our free toolkit, which is available at PastorServe.org/network. This is Jason Daye, encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well.